Disclaimer: These are my experiences. Mental illness hits people differently, and many of these are things only a minority experience. Regardless, I like to talk about this stuff openly because I was #blessed with a lack of shame and this puts me in an excellent position to fight against a stigma that only hurts me when coming from those I love.

The past three months were half me sharing with my sister, and half having my room back to myself. I want to shed some clarity on what living with anxiety and depression is like, so I’m going to call up specific incidents as well as general states of mind, because that’s how that goes; you can’t just get rid of it. It affects the way you act and react, the way you think.

First of all, a confession a long time coming: I’ve been struggling with alcohol. Wine is incredibly cheap in Spain — I generally drink 1.49€ a bottle white wine — and for the time I was sharing a room, I felt hopeless, I couldn’t think of anything that would improve my life and keep me going, and wine was there for me. I started to rely on those alcohol highs to get me through the days. It wasn’t healthy, but it was the only coping mechanism I could afford; I couldn’t bring myself to go through the GP/psychiatrist/psychologist/maybe therapist pain again. I still can’t. Next I go, I want to up my escitalopram, and I will be asking for a therapist. If I have to jump through those same hoops — if I have to put up with whoever is chosen for me, like that awful psychologist I got that last time — I’m not going to go for it.

Hell, I’m thinking of switching GPs, and this one has known me since I was 14, prescribes me what he thinks is the best version of what I think I need, and there’s no way my mom’s going to take it well as he’s been her doctor for even longer.

But here we are. Last month — after my grandma left and my sister moved out of my room — I had my usual long adaptation period — a week at minimum, two, three. I had two bad hangovers, which I’d never experienced before. I genuinely started drinking less, and I’m keeping that up. I’m very proud of myself. No one else is, as long as I drink; apparently the only way to achieve parental support is to quit cold turkey, and I’ve not found a nonalcoholic drink that keeps my fingers away from my brows yet. But I’m not getting drunk every day. I don’t need the high. So I’m trying to do better.

The other thing I need to cut back on is lorazepam. I asked someone what day it was to know how many i could take; they asked me who put me on that treatment, and I laughed. Because otherwise you cry, right? This helps, but I also know, from the time in September I had to quit cold turkey for six days, that I’m addicted. It’s a vaguely controlled addiction. Controlled by me. And it’s messing with my cognitive skills in some way or other. But I’m not ready to let go yet.

Before my grandma left, I had a few meltdowns. Episodes. Whatever you want to call them. Tantrums might be a good descriptor, too. I can’t remember what caused them now, which is a pain because if I did maybe I’d be able to describe exactly why sharing a room does such a number on my mental health. But that’s victim-blaming, isn’t it? Why can’t people just… believe me, when I say I’m in deep pain? At one point, no one did, and it was a proper baby tantrum, kicking at the bed, going at my hair, and while my hair was fine really, I only ever ruin my eyebrows, I then went outside and started channeling my trich onto the plants. It was very destructive in a way I only tend to be self-destructive, and it really bothered me.

I’ve talked about my trich quite a few times on the blog, last time being 2015, so maybe it’s a good time for an update? I do have eyebrows again, but I continue to obsess over them. Sometimes I pull out my lashes, but they’re too close to my eyes for comfort, and that generally keeps me from doing damage. I have to be really angry to go for my head, and have only done so maybe twice in all these years. I don’t envy anyone whose trich is that way, but I wanted to acknowledge that I know it can be worse. You can paint on eyebrows, sometimes, but you can’t paint on hair. One thing you can do, if trich or another form of stress leads to hair loss, is a transplant; the Harley Street Hair Clinic offers FUE hair transplants using your existing hair, which seems much nicer than what I used to think transplants were like.

I have the opposite problem, so far: my eyebrows grow back with a goddamn vengeance.

Anxiety and depression are also why it’s taken me so long to post. Dread less is something I first thought of years ago, and which I still think on a regular basis. It’s not writer’s block. It’s dread.

The other day I straight up pulled out spoon theory on my parents as to why I couldn’t go to the supermarket and still get anything done, and it sort of worked so maybe I should just simplify things that way more. I don’t know. But here’s a full post. It’s taken me three months.

Anxiety has been a companion of mine for a good long, long decade. It’s hard to think of a time when it wasn’t pushing its way through the crevices of my brain and knocking on my temples like a five-year-old child going, “Pay attention to me. Pay attention to me. Oi! Pay attention to me.”

In that time, I’ve tried a sizable amount of techniques and attempted to build habits; I’ve been hesitant to use medication and refused completely and gone back around to ‘yes, let’s’; I’ve accumulated a long list of shit that doesn’t work — much of which makes me angry, too — and a much shorter list of shit that works — well, sometimes.

Sometimes still beats never, so I’m going to share those things that make living with anxiety a little easier on me.

Trichotillomania, for anyone unfamiliar with it, is also called “hair-pulling disorder,” which gives you a good generic idea of what it entails. Essentially, it’s a compulsion to tear out your own hair. It is often caused by anxiety, depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it kind of sucks.

I’d been struggling with it for two years before I knew there was a name for it, and this fall it will be eight years since it started — during what I now consider my first proper depressive episode.

My trichotillomania is focused on my eyebrows, with occasional detours towards my eyelashes and nose hair. There’s something satisfying about tugging at something and having it come out, and once I start, I have a lot of trouble stopping — even though I feel pretty gross right from the get-go.

I already wrote about my history with it. It’s one of my most popular Google Search posts, but it only covers up to two years ago. My year in London caused pretty major changes to the way I saw my eyebrows, so I thought an update was in order.

Trigger warning for suicidal ideation, violent imagery, talk of depression and anxiety and disappointment in the NHS (and by extension the social security in Spain, which wasn’t any better).

Disclaimer: I am not a psychologist; I am not a qualified therapist, or a doctor, or anything of the sort. I talk about my lived experience and what I’ve glimpsed of others’ lived experience.

*

I didn’t intend to begin this post like this, but I will: there’s something really messed up about the fact that the only mental health symptom considered an emergency is attempted suicide.

Here’s how I wanted to begin this post: there isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t think, “I want to kill myself.” Sometimes it’s empty words; sometimes it’s cathartic, the only way to let off steam without screaming. Sometimes it’s just a chorus playing over and over in my head. Sometimes it’s calmness: sometimes I hit rock bottom, and I think about dying, and it’s comforting. My most violent imagery happens those times, when I’m not anxious, when I’m instead calm — unbearably sad, disappointed, resigned — and it helps to picture ways to die.

In general, suicidal ideation is pervasive. The scale goes from those empty words I mentioned above to desire and intent. You need to attempt suicide, or be very, very clear you’re going to, to receive any sort of emergency help. To check into a mental hospital. Feeling like you’re going to explode doesn’t matter unless you plan to end your life. It doesn’t matter if you just want to be dead. Resources cannot be allocated to run-of-the-mill breakdowns.

Suicidal ideation is a symptom of many mental disorders, and I know plenty of people who struggle with it. But I rarely see talk of it in this blogosphere that — wonderfully — speaks up about anxiety and depression so often, and I want to do my part for it.

THIS BLOG

I’m changing my approach to blogging for February. It’s not going to be overly different from your end, I don’t think, but it feels different to me and that makes it exciting and fun and when something is exciting and fun, I’m allowed to run with it.

Basically, I was on chookooloonks.com the other day, and Karen has started a #365daily project where she snaps and posts a photo every day. I’ve been going over the idea in my head for a while, how it would fit into my current blog and whatnot, and I realized that:

1. There’s not much of a blogging routine for something to fit into anyway; this blog was dead for most of January.
2. I don’t want to take new photos as much as I want to get through my backlog.
3. My backlog is full of things I would like to post anyway, like portrait and fashion shoots, travel-related bits and whatnot.
4. Posts I normally sniff at — reviews, in particular — seem much more substantial when you approach them as a beautiful photo accompanied by musings on whatever the photograph is about.
5. I don’t have to stop posting ‘normal’ content; I can just do the ‘starts with a photo’ approach on any days that I don’t have regular content ready to go, and use the ‘starts with a photo’ approach to create regular content like outfit posts and longer photography posts.

I’m trying this for February and seeing how it goes. It means this blog may come off more journal-y than usual, and if I know myself, I may get weirdly embarrassingly existential a time or two. Forgive me if the seventeen-year-old snob in me comes out. She’s got issues.

MY LIFE

1. Instagram

I’m still doing this consistently, which is a wonder and a half. But I’m loving it anyway.

I had a design gig for a PR agency starting last Tuesday — that’s what I was talking about last week when I said I had a reason to keep normal-people hours for the following two weeks. I stressed about everything I could possibly think of to stress about, got there on Tuesday and had most of my concerns relieved, and then at the end of Wednesday, I was told my project had been put on hold. I’ve been depressed all week, because the money for the two weeks would have been a lifesaver, and losing the prospect of it hit me really hard even though I’m nowhere near as badly off as I was for most of last year.

That’s where the Angel station picture came from. The central London photos are from two Tuesdays ago.

3. Upsides

Having to get up at 7 AM two days in a row made me tired at night, which means I’ve been going to bed before 2 AM — often by midnight — all week, and getting up during daylight, if not proper early.

Working full-time made me realize I can get a lot more work done than the amount I operate (and budge) under if I focus and have a lot of time to group and regroup.

I got to meet Ashleigh and it was awesome to have someone to talk to. I don’t get a lot of that irl these days. I also happened to stress not at all about it at any point, which was strange because I usually start worrying I’ve said something stupid or embarrassing five minutes into meeting someone, but that didn’t happen with her.

Working full-time made me realize I can handle and in fact would like a regular job. Part-time, preferably, but I want one regardless, and I want to look for one, and one of these days I will crack down on my resume and start applying. Hopefully this week. I’m still terrified of spending a ton of money on transport and not getting an actual job at the end of it, but I might as well try sending my CV in for things and see what happens.

4. Expenses

I added up my expenses for January and it’s £885.45 total, which isn’t fantastic but given £740 are rent and bills and the rest of it is evenly split between groceries, toiletries and Starbucks with a small amount for transport for a job, I maintain that I should focus on making more money, not on spending less.

The truth is, the holidays are always complicated for me. They are for most people, I think, and there’s a certain pressure to ignore that and be happy, or pretend to be, that hinders more than helps. I’m no less fond of Christmas than most people: it’s a big holiday, a holiday that carries with it a lot of familiar traditions, things you’ve known for years and which are comforting, reassuring in their longevity. The Christmas lights, the songs, the colors, the movies, the decorations, the good wishes and the gifts and the Christmas-themed foods and drinks — I like them. I honestly do. I’m still weirded out that all of London was decked out by November 3rd, but I’m not sick of it or anything. I’m not even sick of the Starbucks Christmas playlist, and trust me, those songs have wormed their way into my brain far more frequently than I’d have liked.

This is the first year in my entire life I’m alone over Christmas, in a foreign country, but it’s not the first year I’m struggling, not the first year I’m sad, not even the first year I’m stressed as fuck about money. For the past five, six years, the holidays have alternated between “depressing,” “gloomy,” and “well, this is better than last year.” For a few years when I was still a teenager, I sent out Christmas cards to my online friends. I remember the time I was living in Madrid and had to find the nearest post office to my dorm and sent out well over 20 cards to different destinations.

I cut that expense. I stopped getting presents. Sometimes my sister and I get something from other family; my aunt gave me a Pimkie gift card two years ago (technically last year, 2013, for Wise Men Day, January 6, the big gift-giving day in Spain) that I used to buy my ubiquitous black leather jacket (my first — my only, though I got a teal one in the sales the following summer — and you’veprobablyseen it). To be completely honest, the lack of presents has never bothered me very much, but it was a reminder of the situation, and it made my mom sad, which made me sad — I’ve never been able to shield out my mom’s feelings.

But there’s more! One year, our electricity was suspended over Christmas. Another year, my mom went to a food bank to fill up the kitchen cupboards. Stir in my volatile relationship with my father, my anxiety and depression, and the pressure to have a good holiday season, and you’ll have a massive clusterfuck of emotions. To wit, note the fact that I told you the miseries of Christmasses past in two short sentences, and then think about how often I’m able to wrap up a sentence in fifteen words if it’s about something I want to talk about. Go on.

Now, I’m not super fussed about what food I eat for Christmas, as long as there is something to eat. Sure, I miss my mom’s roast ham and roast lamb leg and roast potatoes, but it’s something I can live without. I’ve been living without it since I moved here. I’ve been living without quail, too, because I’m too scared to walk into a butcher’s, which has nothing to do with Christmas but it has to do with “foods I used to eat on a regular basis and I haven’t touched since I was forcibly put in charge of my own cooking and grocery shopping.” I stopped eating seafood, my mom’s favorite type of food and a Christmas staple at our home, a few years ago, when a bit of prawn did something weird I could feel in my ear. Most years, the only Christmas sweet I eat is chocolate turrón. I hate marzipan and I’m not often in the mood for polvorones, so I just go for the chocolate(s), which isn’t a Christmas exclusive. Once again, this is something that mattered a lot more to my parents than it did to me. It makes sense, because Christmas is about family meals, to me and to a lot of other people, and it’s hard to get enthused about it if you can eat the meal in five minutes.

(It’s also hard to get me to stick around after I eat the meal, and by my last Christmas at home, I was eating in my room most days, so big dinners were the only family meals I participated in. There are reasons for this, see above re: volatile relationship with my father.)

But the suspended electricity — due to unpaid bills — and the food bank trip, well, those are things that stick. They’re specially sticky because it’s not like our situation is any better now. I’m making more money, but it all goes to rent, and I’m constantly worried I won’t make my next payment. My mom got a three-month government job as a street sweeper, which I hope means she can claim benefits again when it’s over, because otherwise it’s — hard to think about. It pays shit, too, and it’s exhausting, and I’m constantly in awe of her. I haven’t even managed to finish my CV. I keep hoping my freelancing will take off, and being concerned I won’t be able to make it to any interviews if I even get called in for one because of lack of transport money. I’ve been meaning to put in an application at Starbucks since I moved to Hampstead Heath, and I need to reprint it and still haven’t got round to it.

And I’m alone. I usually thrive on being alone. I know for a fact that not living with my family is a major reason I’ve been able to do more work. I didn’t have to worry about rent at home, but a myriad other things caused me anxiety. It’s not like my mental health issues are new. What’s new is that I’m eating properly and actually getting shit done on a regular basis. That happened because I left behind some of my main anxiety triggers. But I am alone, and it gets hard sometimes, and it’s Christmas, and —

I skyped my family on Christmas Eve, and it helped. It helped a lot. It helped more than it usually does, more than I expected. But I went right back to my funk afterwards. Today I’m feeling a little better, a little more optimistic, but I don’t know how long it will last. When I was still in Spain, many of my days ended badly, but they always started well. Now, my days start with a heavy heart and a knot in my stomach. I have no doubt that the reason I feel halfway capable of pushing through this evening is a client bought an additional label design and I can now pay next week’s rent. I didn’t use to worry about it until Friday, at least, but it’s more like Wednesday these days — and sometimes I worry in advance for future weeks’ rent. I used to start my weeks with optimism even if I was starting with £10 in the bank, but that’s no longer the case. Most days, I have to fight off my terror.

On Christmas Eve I was telling myself that I could go back home for six months, a year maybe, not now because it’s my parents’ turn to host my grandma, and that means no room of my own until July. Then July and August are summer, which I can’t handle in Spain. So I’d have to make it to the end of my lease — and maybe things will be better then. It’s a lot of months for things to get better. I’ve made progress, even if it’s slow and I can’t see it.

I’m still terrified. I’m so, so afraid.

I bought an external hard drive last week. I paid for most of it with an Amazon gift card from a sponsored post I did months ago, and the parcel arrived on Monday. I’d been needing an external for a while; I’m constantly struggling with disk space. I got a WD My Passport 1TB drive. Debs, whose new blog I’ve been working on, recommended that one, and it was 44% off so I went for it. I backed up my Mac on it yesterday and I’ll be transferring RAW photos from my USB sticks into that. I’m going to be pushing my youtube channel with movie reviews, mostly, and maybe feminist commentary and the occasional tag, because I love doing vlog tags. I’m actually kind of excited about that. It’s the only thing I’ve been able to get excited about in quite a while. I’m hoping it stays exciting when I start doing it. I want to make money off it, but I’m not counting on it, so hopefully it will just be fun.

I think this is the first time I’ve actually acknowledged to myself that I have that, that I am depressed, instead of dismissing it as a side thing of my anxiety disorder, or just feeling down. A part of me is afraid maybe I’m reading too much into it — I’ve encountered a lot of things about depression in the past week — but then I think, I always come across depression things, both on my “serious” social media spaces and my fandom platforms. I’ve always identified with a lot of it — random tumblr comics, bits of Hyperbole and a Half, I spent an entire morning after an all-nighter reading Robot Hugs and feeling like someone was holding and squeezing my heart, in a good way — but I never identified with depression itself. I think I’ve always overidentified with my anxiety, maybe because it’s so loud, so present, so hard to ignore or misinterpret. People always say that anxiety and depression usually go together. I was on antidepressants for two years, and I still thought I was just treating my anxiety disorder.

But it’s — not that. The thing that sealed it this week was reading a list of usual symptoms and okay, I’ve always struggled with motivation, my sleep schedule has been a mess for the better part of the past six — six! — years, I’m always behind, and, since I moved to London and had to deal with being solely responsible for keeping a roof over my head, I’m always a hair’s breadth away from a breakdown. But things have looked up considerably for the past two weeks, and I could argue that I’m still carrying the severe stress and anxiety from October, November — the stress I felt and the stress I didn’t, the stress from that weekend I didn’t break down despite the way everything felt like it was falling to pieces around me and it would never change.

It changed, a little bit. It’s changed a little bit. It’s changed enough that the reasons I was melting down all through the past two months aren’t there anymore, not right now. And when things changed, when money came in, I felt a little bit of happiness. When I listened to music and danced around my room, I felt a little bit of happiness. When I watched a movie and things worked out in it, I felt a little bit of happiness. I’ve been taking better care of myself than I have in two years.

But the thing is, I’m not excited about anything. At all. Everything comes with a side order of worry, or reluctance, or overwhelm, or plain old blankness. I’ve been popping lorazepam like it’s a daily treatment and I think it’s doing more harm than good, because it quells the anxiety and overwhelm, but at the end of the day it’s a downer and if I’m not counteracting it with antidepressants and I am depressed, could it be making things worse? I also no longer really feel the effect of it, and I miss it. I miss the relief, the stark contrast between moods as it kicks in. The feeling of yeah, this is working.

Yesterday I was just off. I wasn’t feeling up to anything. I wasn’t feeling much of anything. And today I feel just as empty, if a little bit more like I may be able to go through the motions.

And I feel irresponsible. To myself. Because the paroxetine wasn’t doing enough, and I sorted things out to get a GP and instead of going through with the switch and going to therapy sessions, I quit. It wasn’t — it wasn’t quitting, it was giving ‘not being on antidepressants’ a go, and the fact that I slept through both my CBT appointments speaks volumes to how messed up the system is. If my motivation is so fucked that I can’t even drag myself to the doctor to make it better, that I can’t push myself out of bed, isn’t that precisely the reason I need it? Precisely the reason it should be easier for me to pick when and how, instead of be assigned the only empty slot three weeks away in the middle of the morning, like my anxiety and depression aren’t going to make it so I’m so far removed from the initial motivation of booking the appointment in the first place that I no longer think it’s going to be any help. In fact, when I first asked for therapy, individual sessions weren’t even on the table.

It’s a bit of a relief to no longer think that’s my fault. But I do think I should have taken up new antidepressants, and I didn’t, and now I think about going back and getting a new prescription — even though I suspect my GP will just prescribe the same thing she did last time, and I don’t know why I find that disappointing — but I can’t because my sleep schedule is so, so far beyond messed up that I probably wouldn’t make it to my appointment. And the new meds may not work, and if they do, they will take weeks to kick in. And then I’ll be better, and I’ll want to quit them again, and I’ll have to go through the absolute hell that was the week weaning myself off paroxetine hit the ‘stop taking it’ stage.

But if I don’t… What happens if I don’t? I guess things go on the same way they have been. And it’s just as uncertain, and less work, less trouble, less disruption of my routine, such as it is. It’s easier. Is it lazier? Is it irresponsible?

I’ve spent some of the past four days reading a story (fanfic, if you want to know; holler for a link if interested) about someone coming down with severe depression at university and struggling with that, with the usual crap that comes with first realizing you’re not completely sane, and with deciding what to do next: drop out? Take a break? Try to stick it through?

I talk a lot about my mental illness for many reasons. Some are long-term activist reasons, and some are more practical, immediate ones. Some are selfish, wanting to get the pain out of my head and maybe reach for support, and some are selfless. I want people to know they’re not the only ones going through it; I want to make it easier to talk about it; I want people to know there’s nothing embarrassing about having anxiety or depression or any other mental illness, that it’s a real illness like any physical one would be. I want people to know they have various options for treatment and not one of them is morally better than the others. That meds can help, and they don’t make you into a zombie most of the time. That there are ways to harm yourself that aren’t as publicly advertised as cutting but should be taken seriously, too. I want to — I want to speak up because I want other people to speak up because I want people suffering from these invisible illness to be able to tell a friend, a parent, a doctor without fear of being dismissed. And I want the professional treatment that is out there to be better. I want it to be more accessible, and I want it to be better suited for the people who need it.

But this is not a post about how I missed two cognitive behavioral therapy appointments meant to treat my major sleep schedule issues this summer by sleeping through them, and was summarily dismissed.

This is a post about my college experience. The first time round.

I moved to Madrid at the last possible minute, a rainy afternoon on the first of October in 2007. I was seventeen. I’m a November baby. I’d been on my first trip abroad just before then, on a scholarship the ministry gave out to promote ESL immersion learning. It had been my first time in London. I’d fucked up my foot badly, and barely eaten anything because I had limited funds and clothes took priority and my living arrangement, which the school I booked a course with — a scholarship requirement — had set up for me, included breakfast and dinner, but I hated the food the family liked, and I hadn’t cooked in my life myself. I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know how dishwashers worked. I probably sprained my ankle or worse taking twenty-minute walks to the Bounds Green tube station wearing a pair of flimsy golden flats I’d bought in Valencia when I went to my cousin’s wedding in 2006.

I fell in love with the city. I fell in love with the weather, the architecture, the language, the parks. I fell in love with the tube and I fell in love with long walks going nowhere. I fell a little bit more in love with books.

And then I came home, on the 28th of September because I’d booked my trip for the last possible date that wouldn’t overlap with the beginning of university so I could catch a Millais exhibit at the Tate Britain. I got to see my favorite painting of all time in person, so I don’t regret it, even though the day I went to the exhibit, there was an evacuation at the museum for reasons I forget.

My point is, I went home to Ciudad Real, had two days to regroup, and repacked for Madrid. To live in a dorm. My father came with me, carried my suitcase. My relationship with him was already fairly strained, so it wasn’t the nicest trip of all time. It wasn’t awful, either. He’s always come through when I really needed it. He certainly saved my ass a year later when I missed my flight back from Heathrow.

So I went to Madrid, I found my dorm — the only one I’d been able to get a place in as I’d assumed people would start looking after they got their Selectividad grades, not before. It wasn’t a bad dorm. It was on a nice street. Busy, rainy. Wide road. It was a co-ed dorm, and the first thing I heard when I came down to the lobby after my father had left was a chant they’d made up to haze first-time students.

That wasn’t a very auspicious start, but I’m not going to blame my dropout on hazing. I think it’s bullshit, and I know a lot of first-years take it on like a badge of pride and there’s some sort of Stockholm Syndrome thing going on there that’s very concerning. But it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t aggressive, anyway. I was able to do my thing and be left alone. Eventually, I actually said: you know what, I’ve got tachycardia issues — I didn’t know it was mental health yet — and I can’t handle this. I can’t participate in this.

And they did respect my wishes. It did feel a bit like I’d be ostracized, or maybe I was told that. It didn’t feel like it made that much of a difference with my social anxiety generally keeping me from making friends anyway.

I met a girl in my first ever Philosophy class. Her name was Nuria and she was doing Philosophy at the same time as her last year of Art History. We talked and I bumped into a wall because of social anxiety and she had a car and she drove me to the tube station at one point. She had tennis courts somewhere. She said I should go up to her house to play. I’ve always wanted to play tennis.

I didn’t make it to a whole lot of classes, after that. I saw her again, a few times, but she’d got a proper group of friends who were actually around and I was awkward and I wasn’t making it to class all that often. I didn’t want to spend so long on the tube and then walking all the way from the Ciudad Universitaria station to the Philosophy building. I didn’t want to get up.

I was living in a dorm with severe social anxiety and without a laptop. My entire support system up till then — and even now — was people I could only communicate with via my laptop. I spent some time in the computer room upstairs. It was really uncomfortable. I could have found a Starbucks, maybe. I wasn’t as familiar with them in Madrid. My coffeehouse renaissance didn’t happen until Oxford in 2008. I borrowed my roommate’s laptop, sometimes. I couldn’t afford my own. I felt like that was holding me back from being able to do… god, everything. Research, write, write for fun, do uni work, stay sane.

I’d taken my father’s portable DVD player with me and my Gilmore Girls DVDs and I watched a lot of that. I watched Imagine Me and You and A Cinderella Story. I bought another Gilmore Girls boxset with my small allowance from my parents — 200€ a month. I don’t know how they were making enough money back then to give me that, survive themselves, and pay for my dorm until my scholarship came through in fucking December. My dorm mates were pooling together 600€ at a time to spend on booze to pour over first years during parties.

I didn’t understand that at all.

Most of all, though, I really fucked up my eating. The dining hall had long tables and I felt like I had to ask to sit with any group, and I was so anxious about it that I only went if I caught my roommate on the way down with her friends. I walked to Burger King in Callao and ate fast food. I was weak, and at one point, I got up, I got in the shower, and I fainted.

The bruise spanned my entire thigh and changed from yellow to blue to red to purple over the course of two or three weeks until it finally went away.

I don’t know if I’d had trich before, but the first incident of it I clearly remember is writing on my Moleskine journal on my birthday, completely depressed — not in the mental health way, I didn’t think at the time, just hopelessly sad — and pulling out the hairs on my eyebrows and letting them pile up on the slope on the inside of the notebook pages.

When December rolled around, when holidays arrived, I went home for good. I packed and I ate at the same Burger King in Callao while it was raining outside and I went home. I bought myself a MacBook and an iPod for Christmas. I wasn’t going back. I was going to try going by train, commuting from Ciudad Real every day. People did that; Renfe offered monthly passes for about 200-300€ per month for people who commuted to Madrid for work every day.

I think I managed to do that twice, in February.

In May, I bought a Canon camera. It’s the same one I still have. In between the laptop and the DSLR, I got some clothes, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books. I don’t know why I was pretending I might stick out the year. I intended to sit my exams in June, just to keep my scholarship, and I didn’t because I could do it in September and have it amount to the same thing.

I went to my faculty for the last time on September 6, 2008, with my Canon camera, after spending three weeks in Oxford and coming back with 4GB worth of pictures — and I wasn’t shooting RAW at the time. I took a lot of pictures of my way there. It was rainy on the train there, and sunny as I walked to sit my exams.

I signed up for the first two years of English Philology at my hometown’s university. I didn’t want to lose any time. I’d already lost a year. I dropped out eventually in the middle of a vicious circle of not being able to motivate myself to do any work because I didn’t know if my parents would be able to afford tuition for the first year, which I couldn’t get out of the government again since they’d already paid for my first year at Complutense.

My father was really proud of me for getting into Complutense, and hated my hometown’s university. My mom never liked that I’d switched from Math and sciences to Humanities for Bachillerato after having to put up with an awful Math teacher my fourth year of ESO (obligatory secondary education). I hated my hometown’s university, too, and I didn’t want to study English under professors who had worse accents than I did. I was a snob, getting less snobbish by the minute, but I still wasn’t happy. But I hadn’t been proud of going to Complutense, either, because all my chosen degree required was a passing grade from high school and Selectividad. I’d got my average back up to 8/10 after a truly disastrous fourth year of high school (ESO is four years, ages 11-12 to 15-16, and then Bachillerato is two years) that took my A+ student status to nearly having to resit the year for so many absences. This is a story for another time.

I don’t remember dropping out officially. I just remember no one ever saying I should see a doctor, no one considering the possibility that my constant tachycardia wasn’t just a freak physical pattern, no one suggesting medication, no one calling my trich trich until a fanfic exchange chat two years later. I didn’t make peace with having dropped out of the path I’d been so set on having for myself — high school, university, grad school, work; I couldn’t hold on to friends, but I performed really well academically, I loved exams, and that was supposed to be enough.

No one suggested taking a gap year. I don’t know if that was a possibility. No one suggested counselling, or talking to the university about support for people with disabilities because I didn’t even know the anxiety and depression I felt were mental health conditions, let alone that they were classed as disabilities. I didn’t know they were classed as disabilities until last year when someone said I might have luck applying for disability benefits, if my anxiety and depression were getting in the way of my life — which they were.

They have been. For years. Since that fourth year of high school, probably. Since the year I dropped out of college, probably. But I didn’t put a name to them until years later, and I didn’t get treatment until years later, and I didn’t know there was any support or resources available to me to help me continue my education despite having a mental health condition. Until now, I hadn’t even thought of that period of my life as a period where I had depression.

Because if you can’t reflect on what you’ve accomplished on your birthday, when can you?

1. Started a design business — or started freelancing as a designer, whichever. I filled up my Etsy shop in the wee hours of November 8, 2013, and hopefully I’ll have redesigned all the graphics by the end of the weekend. I’m also raising my prices tomorrow, so if you’ve been thinking about hiring me, today would be an excellent time!

2. Discovered print design via media kits, and realized if I could only ever do print design with the occasional logo and larger project thrown in, I would be a happy designer.

3. Designed a magazine cover with my face on it. This was last week, but it counts.

4. Modeled professionally — i.e. for money — for the first time in my life.

5. Was on a boat also for the first time in my life. For a shoot. Wore a wedding dress for the first time in my life, also for a shoot. Modeling is kind of awesome, but can be terribly exhausting, too.

6. Attended my first ever blogger event. It was interesting. My social anxiety reached highs (lows?) I’d forgotten it could reach, but I’m glad I went.

8. Photographed a fashion shoot with a full creative team for the first time in my life. It was one of those experiences where you learn a few things the hard way — both about yourself and about other people, the creative industry, the importance of agreements and so on. I haven’t shared this shoot on the blog yet, but I will sometime this month. I’m proud of those photos, and I enjoyed working with the creatives on that team.

9. Photographed products for money for the first time! That’s another shoot I’m dying to share with you guys. Not only did I photograph them, but I also modeled them. Self-portraiture commercial photography is so much fun when you’ve got a little bit of help.

10. Photographed real-life people who were actually there to be photographed. Not for money, yet, but hopefully sometime soon. I’ve posted two bits of shoots so far: Christine Cherry and Leigh Travers. But there’s a fair bit more.

Another beauty shoot I need to post: Paulina Maria (model) styled by herself and made-up by Bethany Owen, who styled and MUA’d and organized the boat shoot above.

11. Volunteered to photograph a Pride event. Need to share those photos on the blog, too, probably. This list may be a list of posts to come, ha.

12. Got used to getting out of the house and walking at least ten minutes every day again for the first time since I dropped out of college (again) in 2009.

13. Went off antidepressants. It was horrible. I needed a change, and I stabilized eventually, but I had some of the worst days I’ve ever had. I was suicidal and crying and couldn’t do anything.

14. Had a lot of breakdowns over money. Had some of the truly worst days of my life. Survived them all.

And made a book to remember it.

15. Started making money regularly, if only because I needed it to stay housed and fed. Didn’t always make it on time, but things worked out somehow. In this new year of my life, I would like to take the “somehow” out of the equation.

16. Flathunted for the first time in my life. It was horrible. It did a number on my mental health. It really was my least favorite thing I did this year. The thought of having to do it again sometime makes me understand why people pay exorbitant agency fees. Then again, I’d probably have had less trouble flathunting if I’d had that kind of cash. Things worked out, anyway. Somehow. Stroke of luck. I don’t want anyone to think there’s a trick or a way to make it through flathunting in London on a tiny budget unscathed. There isn’t, unless you have a stroke of luck.

17. Lived in Ciudad Real, Spain, with my parents and sister and cat; lived in Belsize Park with my best friend for a very short time; lived in Leicestershire with a friend I met through this blog for another short time; lived in Ladbroke Grove with two cats and a puppy (and a landlady); lived in Streatham with a kitten (and no one else); lived in Crouch End with a flatmate whose father was the owner of the flat; lived in Hampstead Heath with a host family (and another lodger); lived — live — in Belsize Park in a rented room in the landlady’s flat, with said landlady and two cats and another lodger (and as of today, one besides).

There was a lot of moving. A lot of temporary solutions and things that didn’t work out. I have a year-long lease now, and I’m hoping it will last the year, at minimum. See #16.

There were also quite a few cats.

This is the one I was tasked with keeping alive for a week.

18. Wrote for money for the first time in my life. Truly never thought I’d be able to make money off my writing, so it’s been an interesting turn. I need to be more consistent about it, because I truly suck at that bit, but there’s potential for regular income and that’s really important to me.

19. Had a crush on a real live person for the first time in ages. I forgot about it until a few weeks ago, and then I was like, wait, no, it wasn’t that long ago that I last had a proper crush. I was still on antidepressants, so it was a bit different from crushes past, but it was definitely a crush. It’s just good to know I haven’t lost my ability to be attracted to real-life people, you know? Years of basically being a hermit can make you wonder.

20. Was on my own for my birthday for — the second time, actually. First was in college, the first time, when I was in a dorm. Similar bad place, similar journaling bits, only now I depend on myself, and I mostly make it work. But I haven’t cried in a really bad way yet, and that’s kind of amazing.

21. Skipped the Spanish summer, and could not be happier about that. Finally. (Sorry I missed my sister’s birthday, but you know. I wasn’t in the country.)

Not that summer skipped London, but it wasn’t awful nearly as frequently.

22. Designed a mockup of my ideal blog, and delegated the coding to a friend. This was also last week, and it also still counts. I’m straightening out my branding and I’m very, very happy with the way it’s turning out.

23. Invested in a few things — was able to invest in a few things — starting with a tripod and a tablet, and ending with a flight to another country for the purpose of a trip to see my best friend or maybe staying, if I could make it work for me.

24. Made it work for me, and stayed in London. Six months last week. When 2013 started, I’d made that the year I got out, and it never happened — but it happened four months into 2014. Despite all the stress, all the worrying, all the breakdowns, all the times I’ve missed my cat and my guitar and my mom, not necessarily in that order; despite how hard it’s been, I’m so, so, so proud of myself for taking the plunge and getting that flight ticket.

I try to keep that in mind, because it was a true display of bravery that I didn’t think I was capable of. I really thought it would never happen, not on my own. But I’m here, and I’m finding my footing, and all through the pessimistic bits, all the hopelessness, this is where I want to be. This was my dream move, and I made it happen.

—

So, those are some things I did when I was 24. I still need to go through my 25 Before 25 list and see how hard I failed at it, but I did make progress on some of it. And then I’ll see about putting together a 26 Before 26 — or maybe not until I’ve accomplished at least 50% of the 25 list. That seems doable, yeah? I think it does.

Back to work now — that’s what I’m doing for my birthday, trying to use the motivation of a new beginning to get on track. I blogged about this on Tuesday, and my birthday wishlist is still open if anyone wants to buy me anything. Like I keep saying: book me for a shoot and I’ll buy that 50mm lens and use it on you. Do it for my birthday. Or for yourself. I do take excellent pictures, and I do excellent design things with them.

First things first, I have — or rather, Rafflecopter has — drawn a winner for my media kit giveaway, and the lucky lady is Crystal from The Happy Type! As a longtime reader of her blog, I could not be more excited to work with her.

I recapped October on Sunday, and you’re welcome to have a read of how that went. It wasn’t great, but it didn’t end too badly. Now, this November thing. November means:

It’s my birthday. This Saturday, actually. Expect a birthday wishlist on Wednesday and probably a Twitter meltdown on Saturday, let’s be real, I suck at keeping it together on my birthday. I have zero plans at the moment and don’t foresee making any, which I have mixed feelings about. I haven’t celebrated my birthday in years but I feel like I should do something special. I’m going to be leaving my early twenties behind, after all. That’s kind of… horrifying, a little bit. Not really. I don’t even know if I’m capable of bastardizing Taylor Swift’s 22 for twenty-five. Twenty-five. Holy shit. Moving on…

It’s been six months since I moved country. I already blogged about this, but the thought keeps popping into my head at random intervals. Shouldn’t I have it together by now? Obviously that’s a really toxic thing to think, and I’m constantly torn between wanting to do better really badly, and freaking out that if it hasn’t happened yet, it’s never going to. But I’m also trying to think about what works and what doesn’t in terms of self-care, because I’ve had six months to pick up and drop habits, good and bad, and flying by the seat of my pants is clearly not an approach that works, so I need to take a good look at myself and my choices and make better ones in the aspects of my life that I have control over. Because I do have some control over some aspects of my life, like what I eat and what I do with my time and whether I consume enough entertainment to keep myself from combusting in a cloud of work-related overwhelm.

One thing I’ve noticed recently is I spent so many years avoiding music because it was hard for me to focus on fiction writing with it playing that I forgot to bring my iPod to London with me, and I haven’t necessarily missed it — I would have had to bring my speakers along as well — but I’ve missed music. I interact with it differently now that the bulk of my work doesn’t involve words, and the work that does involve words doesn’t rely on cadence and pacing — not the way fiction does, anyway. iTunes is right there, and when I do listen to music, it lifts me up. There are very few things that have that effect on me, and none that have it so quickly and unobtrusively, so I need to use that knowledge. Gymnastics is also good for me, and it’s something that I can easily watch while I eat. It’s not quite the TV show I wanted to pick up — just one! I can’t choose! — but it’s a start.

It’s NaNoWriMo. It’s also NaBloPoMo, which I’m actually doing, or attempting to — this post was supposed to go up yesterday. But there’s something incredibly comforting and motivating about a whole lot of people doing the exact same thing at the same time, and I’ve actually been writing on a notebook every day since November 1. I don’t know if it’s really helping yet, but it’s got potential. It’s helped before. It’s all about taking a moment — ten, twenty minutes — before I dive into the Internet to assess my situation and talk out my concerns and keep track of, like I said above, what’s working and what isn’t.

I’ve also found myself, since I started journaling, thinking about blog posts as stories — or thinking of stories as potential blog posts. All these little tidbits of my life I didn’t know how to talk about, how to share, are taking shape in my head, and it’s weird because this kind of thing usually happens when I see somebody else do what I want to do and do it well, but it’s happening spontaneously.

It’s getting dark really early, and I need daylight to stay sane. Apparently. Or something. What’s tripping me up, besides the fact that I’m still dragging a 5 AM to 5 PM sleep schedule and I generally wake up with my anxiety beating down on my motivation, is I’ve got used to and found comfort in going to Starbucks right after I get up — at 5 PM — and staying there till closing, while it’s dark outside, and I could potentially still do this — work at home and come to Starbucks in the evening — but in order to do that, I need to be able to turn the heating on in the morning, and there’s a minor issue there that requires me to talk to my landlady and like, assert myself and I suck at this so much that I’m very much considering spending daylight time at Starbucks and going back home around 6 PM when she’s back and turns the heating on. But I shouldn’t be spending so much time (read: money) at Starbucks anyway. Dilemma!

So that’s where I’m at as November begins. I think my main goal for the week is to work on time management. Again. Two weeks ago I didn’t have any way to make money, and right now I’ve got a few ways but I keep getting bogged down in thinking that I have so much to do and not enough time to do it, which is a lie because I really waste a ton of it. Focusing is hard, but it’s not impossible, and for the first time in a while I feel mildly capable of blocking time and taking breaks and just being tidier about it all. Music and NaNoWriMo are here to help me along! So I’m going to try.

Linking up with Weekly Wishes as always! Here’s to a great birthday month. I especially can’t wait for my blog redesign to come together! It’s out of my hands at the moment, though, so I get to focus on work — writing, design — and my photography backlog. So many pictures to edit and share!